Brain Jack (22 page)

49 | STICKS AND STONES

Sam looked around desperately. The shelter had turned into a trap.

If they hadn’t seen him yet, they would any second.

There was a small gap at the rear of the store, at the apex of the fallen rear concrete wall. Barely enough room for a person, and had he been a little thicker around the middle, he would not have made it through, but he did, taking care not to scratch or tear his safety suit as he did so.

The terrible image of Vienna running through the clouds of dust without her hood or mask was seared into his mind.

He dived to the side of the narrow gap as shouts sounded behind him.

He was in a low space: what had perhaps been the floor of a warehouse or factory but was now just a few feet high. The floor was not flat but was a cratered moonscape of bricks, concrete fragments, and dust.

Light beckoned to the right-hand side, and he clambered over toward it.

The space suddenly sang with the rapid report of full automatic fire, incredibly loud in the restricted space. Crushed bricks and rubble danced around him.

A bullet kicked up dust by his hand.

One bullet—that would be all it took.

He scrabbled over toward the light and eased himself out through a large crack in the side of the building into daylight. He had to get back and warn Dodge before they located the house.

Sweat from the exertion was already fogging his mask, but there was nothing he could do about that. He ran awkwardly through the jagged landscape, glancing around behind him to check for pursuers.

The deeper he ventured into the maze of crushed buildings, the harder it would be for them to find him. He took one twisted pathway after another, climbing over, around, or under the demolished structures.

Two soldiers appeared over to his right from behind a broken wall. He ducked behind a wooden door, blown from its hinges but otherwise intact.

The soldiers moved out of sight, and he skirted around to the left, trying to keep some distance between them and himself.

Sometimes he could tell whether he was outside or inside a building; other times the difference was not so clear.

The nuclear bomb had taken bits from everywhere and jumbled them together in indiscriminate piles. He clambered over the wrecked shell of a late-model car that was in the bedroom of a burned-out house. A roulette wheel was embedded in a brick wall a little farther on, flung halfway across the city by the force of the explosion.

He heard distant shots and wondered who they were shooting at.

Vienna?

Occasionally, he came to a road, although the roads were so strewn with rubble and masonry that they were no easier to pass than the broken buildings.

The farther he got from the hypocenter, however, the clearer the roads became. The buildings here had collapsed in on themselves rather than being blasted from their foundations.

He could tell from the mountains and the position of the sun the approximate direction in which to travel, but it was still a relief when he found himself on streets he recognized, close to the golf course.

Sam sprinted as fast as he could. He was surely far enough away from the searchers now that speed was more important than stealth.

He spun around a corner and kept running, his heart pounding and his breath coming in harsh bursts. Sam was halfway toward the road when he heard the sound of an engine, and one of the gray vans turned the corner behind him.

A crush of timber blocked the center of the street, blown there from a nearby lumber yard; he climbed over it, conscious that the van could not follow.

Crumbled walls of a large building, maybe a factory, rose to his right, and on the left was a jungle of jagged timber and overturned shipping containers.

He could not go left. He could not go right. When he heard the shout and a single bullet whined off the tarmac by his foot, he stopped.

There was nowhere to go.

The soldier stood on top of the pile of wood, his rifle aimed right at Sam’s head.

At this distance, he could not miss. The shot had been a warning, Sam realized. Ursula wanted him alive.

That made sense. She would want to find out what he knew. What they had been up to. What their plans were.

And he knew everything.

He knew about the Plague virus, and he knew about Cheyenne Mountain.

Once they rammed a neuro-headset onto his head, Ursula would know that, too, and their only chance would be gone.

If they captured him alive, that was.

He began to back away from the soldier.

“Don’t move!” the man shouted. “Or I will shoot.”

Two or three other soldiers were climbing up the blockade to join him.

There is no choice, Sam thought with an eerie kind of calm, and took another step.

The man raised the rifle to his eye and sighted along it.

Sam shut his eyes.

Sometimes, as a child, he had wondered what it would be like to be dead. Suddenly dead. Without warning, from a drive-by bullet or a brain aneurysm. One moment you’re charging along at 100 percent, thinking about all kinds of stuff, deciding what you’re going to have for lunch and who you’re going to hang out with after school. And the next minute you’re not.

You’re dead.

You’re not thinking about anything.

You’re not making any plans.

You’re just
not
.

There was a thud from in front of him, and he opened his eyes in time to see a jagged brick end bounce along the blockade of wood in front of the soldier and crash to the ground.

The man’s gun wavered, and his eyes moved up to the right in time to see a second jagged brick come hurtling toward him, landing just behind him.

His gun pointed in that direction now, along with the weapons of the other soldiers around him, but there was nothing to see. Nothing to fire at.

As Sam watched, another brick, then another, came flying up and over the wall of the ruined factory, hurtling down toward the men.

One of them unleashed a spray of automatic fire in that direction, but the bullets just kicked puffs from the broken concrete wall.

It had to be Dodge on the other side of that wall.

The bricks were flying wild, but just by sheer numbers they were starting to connect.

One hit the barrel of one of the men’s weapons, jolting it from his grasp. A second later, one of the bricks caught the first soldier across the shoulder, tearing a gaping hole in the silvery fabric of the radiation suit.

The soldier grabbed at the tear, trying to pull the fabric back across the hole but to little avail. With a look of panic visible even through the dark glass of his face mask, the soldier turned and stumbled back down on the far side of the junk pile of wood.

That was it, Sam realized. Dodge knew the one thing the soldiers would fear the most: radiation. The rain of half and quarter bricks was constant now as he flung the most primitive weapon of them all against the sophisticated weaponry of the soldiers.

Another soldier took a glancing blow across his helmet, which sliced the fabric of his hood.

Sam turned and ran, zigging and zagging to make it harder for the soldiers to aim, but there were no shots.

He made it to the end of the street and reached the tall wire fence surrounding the golf course. It was at least ten feet high, and he hurled himself at it, hauling himself up and over and dropping down onto the embankment on the other side. He ran into the forest, hoping to lose himself amongst the trees before the soldiers could regroup and follow him.

Away from the immediate danger of the men and their guns, the image resurfaced again and again despite his desperate attempts to push it out of his mind:
Vienna running through the streets without her hood or mask
.

Breathing in the dust
.

The radioactive dust
.

50 | THE DAM

Dodge met him at the front of the house. Tyler was right behind him, holding the laptop, still looking weak and pale from his ordeal.

“Thanks, Dodge,” Sam said.

He shrugged. “Thank Tyler; it was his idea.”

“We’re leaving,” Sam said. “Now.”

“What about Vienna?”

“I don’t know.”

Sam peeled off his hazmat suit, tossing it into the dry fountain, along with any dust, the residue of his frantic dash through the streets. The others did the same.

Dodge jumped in the driver’s seat of the pickup truck, parked in the courtyard, and Tyler got in the front passenger seat. Sam dived in the back as Dodge gunned the vehicle, spinning the steering wheel as he flung the machine back around onto the narrow road through the forest.

His eye caught a movement as they raced back toward the North Boulder Highway. A lone figure, running, stumbling, falling.

“Vienna!” he shouted.

Dodge had seen her, too, and veered the pickup toward her. Sam jumped out even before they had stopped and hauled her up by one arm.

Her face was gray as he dragged her back toward the pickup and dumped her on the backseat before climbing in beside her.

Dodge took off as Sam was shutting the door, spraying dust into the air behind them.

Vienna coughed and coughed again, bringing up gray mucus.

Sam watched her, horrified. But there was nothing he could do.

“Where are we going?” Tyler asked as the western mountains slid their way around to the right side of the car.

“Head south,” Sam said. “Maybe we can convince them we’re heading for Mexico. As soon as we can, we’ll hide the pickup and change cars. Then we’ll cut east into Arizona and up through New Mexico to Colorado.”

Sam glanced back at the mountains on the far side of the lost city. A rising plume of dust caught his eye in the center of the city.

“That’s one of their vans,” he said, “moving through the—”

Dodge cut him off. “If we can see their dust cloud, then they can see ours.”

He floored the gas pedal and the pickup surged forward.

The vans picked them up just on the outskirts of Henderson. Sam could see two vans screaming along the freeway as they raced to beat the pickup to the interchange with South Boulder Highway and cut them off at the pass.

They narrowly made it through, swinging through the interchange on protesting tires and veering around onto Route 93 just a hundred yards in front of the vans.

“Take my gun,” Tyler said, retrieving it from the glove compartment. Tyler held the gun through the gap in the front seats. Sam looked at it blankly.

“Are you kidding?” he said. “I wouldn’t know which end was which. Pass me the laptop!”

It was on the floor in the front of the cab, by Tyler’s feet. He passed it to Sam.

“What are you doing?” Dodge asked.

“Government vehicles,” Sam said. “They’ll be LoJacked. If I can hack into the satellite system, I might be able to shut them down.”

“Go for it,” Dodge said with a tight grin.

“Damn. No cellular signal,” Sam said after a moment of trying to connect.

“Keep your eye on it,” Dodge said. “We should pick up something as we approach Boulder City.”

“I’ll need their license plates,” Sam said.

“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” Tyler said as they flew across an overpass and found themselves suddenly surrounded by tussock and scrub.

One moment they had been amongst the built-up houses of a Las Vegas suburb; the next it was gone, and the desert enveloped them.

The fence was in front of them before they realized it, blocking the road, stretching as far as they could see to either side. The end of the contamination zone. There was no way to go around it, no time to avoid it.

“Hang on!” Dodge yelled, and powered the pickup toward the center of two gates, locked with a chain.

The pickup hit the gates dead center with a terrible grinding crunch. The heavy chain in the center held, but the hinges on either side gave way. The pickup carried both gates forward for a few yards before they flipped over the top and crashed to the ground behind the truck.

There was a screech of brakes as one edge of the gates dug into the highway and the other edge reached out for the windshield of the leading van behind them.

The van hit the gate with a loud crack that starred but did not break its windshield. The following van also slammed on its brakes to avoid a collision, and the gap behind the pickup widened rapidly.

It wasn’t until they reached Boulder City that the vans caught up with them again. Boulder was virtually deserted, most of the residents having long since moved away, not wanting to live adjacent to a nuclear bomb site.

“Government plate CDD7605,” Sam said out loud, reading the plates of the closest van.

“Don’t let them get in front of you,” Tyler warned. “They’re trained to do that.”

The vans tried several times, on the left or the right, sometimes both sides simultaneously, but Dodge countered them with violent swings of the big pickup.

“I got a signal,” Sam cried out, just out of Boulder. It was weak, but it was there.

They were climbing now. Hilly peaks to the right and scrubland to the left as they closed in on Lake Mead and the historic Hoover Dam.

A sharp burst of gunfire came from behind them as they straightened out after a sweeping right-hand curve, and there was a series of thuds from the truck’s bed.

“I think they’re running out of ideas,” Dodge said, swinging the truck around corner after corner.

“They’ve changed their minds,” Tyler said.

“Changed their minds about what?” Sam asked.

“Taking us alive,” Tyler replied.

“Give me the gun,” Vienna said in a voice that was little more than a rasp.

“Are you okay to—” Tyler started.

“Just give me the gun.”

She wound down her window and aimed the pistol backward, letting off two quick shots, coughing weakly as she did so.

“How’s that site coming?” Dodge asked.

“Almost in,” Sam said.

It was a Virtual Private Network, and he had to crack the PPTP to gain a foothold.

One of the vans hurled itself up on the right, and Dodge slammed the pickup over into it with a juddering crash that threw Sam’s hands from the keyboard. The van stuck there for a moment as if glued to the side of the pickup, then dropped back as Dodge twisted the wheel around farther, forcing them off the road.

The other van was making a run on the left-hand side, inching its way in front of them to block their path. Dodge wrenched at the wheel, and the tires of the pickup screamed as they veered onto an off-ramp to Hoover Dam.

“You can’t get across the dam anymore,” Tyler yelled. “They closed it to traffic when they opened the bypass!”

“Got nowhere else to go,” Dodge yelled back.

“There’s a vulnerable TCP port in the NetBIOS,” Sam said, poking around the LoJack server. “The session services in the message block.”

Another hammering burst of fire sounded behind them, and the rear window starred and cracked. Vienna fired twice again, the gunshots crashing like thunder inside the cab of the truck.

“Can you discover the Windows shares?” Dodge asked through gritted teeth.

“Already got them,” Sam said. “Trying to wriggle into the RPC.”

“Here they come again—get down!” Tyler yelled as the vans took advantage of a passing area to attack from both sides, raking the pickup with automatic fire as they accelerated alongside.

Dodge forced the left van toward the rocky wall, ignoring the firing from the right until the left van fell back; then he swung the pickup violently over to the right.

The right-hand van slammed on its brakes to avoid being shunted off the side of a cliff, and fell back in behind the pickup with a squeal of protest from its tires.

“Hang on!” Dodge shouted.

Sam looked up to see concrete crash barriers in a line across the road in front of them. He braced himself against the front seat and hugged the precious laptop to his body.

The bull-bar of the pickup truck smashed into the barrier at the narrow gap between two of the units. Concrete exploded past both sides of the truck, and Sam’s seat belt slammed into his chest, the laptop almost flying out of his arms. But the concrete barriers gave way, bunted to each side to make a gap for the flying pickup truck. Then they were through and on the old road across the top of the dam.

“Okay, I’m in,” Sam cried. “What’s that plate again?”

“CDD7605,” Vienna rasped over the sound of gunfire close behind.

Sam keyed it in and poised the cursor above the Remote Shutdown button.

“Hold it,” Dodge said. “I’ll tell you when.”

Through the left window, Sam could see water. To the right, the vast concrete structure fell away from them into a deep canyon. Stretching between the walls of the canyon, impossibly high, was the massive arch of the bypass road, pencil-thin concrete towers supporting a narrow ribbon of bridge.

Another concrete barrier came and went with the same shattering explosion of concrete chips and dust. Then they were across and careening around a tight curve beneath a rocky cliff face. Sam’s eye was caught by a massive drainpipe, surely a hundred yards high, that disappeared into the rock face to the right. Another tire-screeching corner and they were rising up a gently curving road toward a hairpin bend.

“There,” Dodge said. “Right on the bend.” He gunned the engine toward the corner.

Sam looked back and saw a dark shape leaning out the window of the nearest van, readying another shot.

“Shake her around a bit,” he yelled, and Dodge jerked the steering wheel back and forth, spoiling the man’s aim. The driver’s-side mirror cracked and starred, but the rest of the volley went wild.

Then they were on the curve, the pickup lifting and tilting as Dodge forced it around at high speed.

For a moment, Sam thought they were going to roll, but the huge tires of the pickup steadied and straightened out of the curve.

“Now!” Dodge yelled.

Sam hit the button on the laptop just as the first van entered the apex of the curve. For a half second, he thought nothing would happen; then the nose of the van, which had been riding high, suddenly dropped as the engine lost power.

On a steep rise, on a hairpin bend, it had almost the same effect as slamming on the brakes of the van, and there was a screech and a thud from behind it as the following van swerved hard to the left to the outside of the bend, clipping the rear of the lead van and spinning it around 180 degrees. It slid over toward the side of the road, hit the safety railing with a crunch, and stayed there.

The trailing van was not so lucky. It rose onto two wheels with the impact of the collision and continued to veer left, crunching into and rolling over a thick stone wall and disappearing from sight.

On the other side of that wall, a steep slope led straight down to the lake, and Sam didn’t need to hear the splash to know that that van would not be following them again.

Vienna whooped with excitement, then convulsed as a spasm of coughing racked her body.

Overhead, a cloud burst with a flash and a distant roar of thunder, and it began to rain.